Two days before the start of the trial, the plaintiffs requested that Cantwell be severed from the other defendants, in consideration of his due-process arguments, suggesting he could be tried at a later date when he is no longer incarcerated.ĭuring the pretrial hearing, Cantwell declined to stipulate the authenticity of the chats from Discord, a private messaging platform, where the defendants planned the Unite the Right rally. "I don't know what this pile of documents is," he added, gesturing to a box delivered to him in court by one of the plaintiff's attorneys. "I have no idea what's going on," Cantwell told the court.
#UNITE THE RIGHT DC ORGANIZER TRIAL#
22, he unsuccessfully moved to postpone the trial for 12 months. 22 that the acoustics were so bad in the courtroom that he bought a hearing aid for the trial.Ĭantwell, who is serving an active prison sentence for threatening to rape a fellow white supremacist's wife, has complained that he hasn't had adequate time to prepare his defense on Oct. Moon said during a pretrial hearing on Oct. To complicate matters further, Judge Moon has had difficulty hearing during some of the pre-trial hearings. At least two of the defendants, Cantwell and Spencer, are representing themselves. With 24 defendants and nine plaintiffs, the trial is likely to present logistical hurdles. The city is currently considering a proposal from the Jefferson School of African American Heritage Center to melt down the bronze Lee statue and transform it into a piece of public art that would be given to the city. The city finally removed the statues in July 2021, after the Virginia Supreme Court rejected legal challenges. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in early 2017, Jason Kessler, who is now on trial, mobilized a campaign to protect them that attracted a violent coalition of white supremacist groups. After Charlottesville City Council voted to remove the statues of Confederate generals Robert E. and Washington DC - since 2017, Charlottesville has continued grapple with the painful legacy of the Unite the Right rally. While moments of upheaval have transpired in other cities - Minneapolis Louisville, Ky. But while the alt-right and its leaders foundered in early 2018 and its desperate remnants embraced domestic terrorism, the next four years have seen the unfurling of a broader far-right movement rooted in Americanist nationalism, conspiracy thinking, gun fanaticism and eagerness for civil war.
The alt-right collapsed, in part, because the public, with the notable exception of President Trump, recoiled in horror at the events in Charlottesville, and its numbers dwindled in the face of street opposition and doxing by antifascists while litigation depleted the movement's resources. The defendants, i ncluding Richard Spencer, were the leading figures of the alt-right movement, a rebranding of white supremacy that took a precipitous tumble in the months following Unite the Right. "It just seems to me that anyone that obviously is probably going to be struck - I think it would be hard for this gentleman to be sympathetic to Mr. Later, the judge expressed exasperation when the plaintiff's attorney objected to excusing a juror who said his daughter was a friend of Heyer and that he attended a vigil in her honor. "We'll take 15 to 20 minutes on Monday to get to the same point we could get to today," Moon said with evident irritation. "I'm not sure thinking of antifa as terrorists after they spent 2020 looting is a controversial point of view," Cantwell said in reference to a prospective juror that the plaintiffs proposed for excusal.Ĭantwell also objected to eliminating a juror who indicated on the questionnaire that he's unable to concentrate because of COVID and would have difficulty being impartial because they are "sick of all this." During the hearing, defendant Christopher Cantwell, who is representing himself, frequently interrupted plaintiffs' counsel. Testy exchanges between plaintiffs and defendants during a pretrial hearing last week to winnow the pool of prospective jurors suggest jury selection could take longer than expected. Moon has previously indicated it might spill over to Tuesday. Jury selection is likely to take up the entire day of the first trial, but Judge Norman K. The plaintiffs have already proven their case against two defendants, Elliot Kline and Robert "Azzmador" Ray, through adverse inference findings by a magistrate judge. accelerated his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of antiracist marchers killing Heather Heyer, seek to prove that the white nationalist organizers of the Unite the Right engaged in a conspiracy to commit racially motivated violence under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. The plaintiffs, who were injured in the explosion of violence that culminated when James Alex Fields Jr. today, the culmination of more than four years of litigation. A civil trial against organizers of the deadly August 2017 Unite the Right rally gets underway in Charlottesville, Va.
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